Ai-Ling Lin is the principal investigator in her own lab in the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging and an assistant professor in pharmacology and nutritional sciences at the University of Kentucky.

A native of Taiwan, Lin decided to pursue science in junior high. “I was inspired by Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, because I was so fascinated by how they could use simple equations to describe how things work and the beauty of the universe,” she says.

Lin came to UK because of the opportunity to do translational neuroimaging research and the strength of the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging funded by the National Institute on Aging. “I don’t want just do animal work. I want to translate all these findings into human clinical trials and to make real impact in patients and in healthcare. So UK is excellent environment for me to do this,” says Lin.

“This lab, this team, is just like a family and we care for one another, but at the same time we learn from each other.”

The team’s goal is to identify effective interventions to slow down brain aging and prevent dementia. “We’re using rapamycin, an FDA-approved drug that can extend longevity and also reduce neuropathology. And we use different levels of nutritional intervention to see how diet can impact our cognition. We using imaging to identify the treatment efficacy of these two interventions, and do behavior testing to see how this impacts animal memory and learning ability and hope one day we can translate this to humans.”

Nominations are now being accepted for the University of Kentucky Sanders-Brown Center on Aging Centenarian Awards.
Those nominated for the Sanders-Brown Centenarian Award must be age 100 or older within the 2016 calendar year and must live in Kentucky

A multi-institutional study has defined and established criteria for a new neurological disease closely resembling Alzheimer’s disease called primary age-related tauopathy (PART). Patients with PART develop cognitive impairment that can be indistinguishable from Alzheimer’s disease, but they lack amyloid plaques. Awareness of this neurological disease will help doctors diagnose and develop more effective treatments for patients with different types of memory impairment.

The study, co-led by Peter T. Nelson, MD, PhD, of the University of Kentucky's Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, and John F. Crary, MD, PhD, of Mount Sinai Hospital, was published in the journal Acta Neuoropathologica.

In the late 1990s, Donna Wilcock was exploring electrical activity in the epileptic brain as part of her undergraduate study in England, but her focus took an interesting turn as her studies into brain function deepened. "I began to wonder what, exactly, was going wrong in the brain as people developed dementia? What made them forget things?" said Wilcock. And that question bloomed into a career path focused on the triggers for a disease process that affects millions of people worldwide.

Assistant Professor Joe Abisambra, researcher at the University of Kentucky Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, has demonstrated for the first time that tau impairs protein synthesis — a key component in memory loss.

"Though the exact mechanisms leading to memory loss in tauopathies are not yet known, the scientific community has acknowledged for years that in Alzheimer’s disease brains, tau associates with ribosomes, the hub of protein production. " said Abisambra.

Dr. Gregory Bix has been given honorary status in the College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Bix will be an honorary clinical lecturer in the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology. His appointment will expire in 2020.